San Francisco Symphony Cancels North Carolina Concerts, Citing Anti-Gay-Rights Law

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The San Francisco Symphony, under Michael Tilson Thomas, at Carnegie Hall in April. To protest a new North Carolina law restricting anti-discrimination measures against gay, bisexual and transgender people, the orchestra has canceled concerts planned in that state.CreditHiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

The San Francisco Symphony announced on Monday that it had canceled a pair of April concerts in North Carolina to protest the new state law curbing anti-discrimination protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

The orchestra joins a growing list of luminaries who have shunned the state: rockers such as Bruce Springsteen and Ringo Starr; athletes, including the N.B.A., which moved its All-Star Game to New Orleans; and other classical musicians, like the violinist Itzhak Perlman. The symphony’s move shows that the fallout over the law, commonly known as House Bill 2, is continuing to resonate after Gov. Pat McCrory, the Republican who signed it into law, lost his bid for re-election.

The action affects concerts on April 5 and 6 in Chapel Hill, where the symphony had planned to play music by John Cage, Bartok and Mahler before traveling to Carnegie Hall in New York. The orchestra said that it was inspired in part by the mayor of San Francisco, Edwin M. Lee, who decided to bar city employees in publicly funded positions from traveling to North Carolina on business. While the orchestra is not a public entity, officials said that they wanted to honor their role as cultural ambassadors who uphold the values of their city.

Michael Tilson Thomas, the music director of the San Francisco Symphony, was part of a new generation of classical musicians who spoke openly about being gay. He was traveling on Monday and unavailable for comment, but in an interview with The New York Times in front of a live audience earlier this year he spoke of San Francisco as a place that “has allowed me to be, in the fullest sense, an American, a Jew, and, as of two years ago, a gay married man.”

The North Carolina law nullifies local ordinances establishing anti-discrimination protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, and requires people in public buildings to use restrooms that correspond with the gender listed on their birth certificates. It has divided artists — some of whom have chosen to boycott the state, and others of whom have chosen to appear there to speak out against it. Last week Joshua Weilerstein, artistic director of the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne in Switzerland, who conducted the North Carolina Symphony in October, announced that he was donating his fee to Equality NC, a group in that state that works for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

Brent Assink, the executive director of the San Francisco Symphony, said in a statement that the orchestra had held off canceling the concerts until now in the hope that the law would be overturned, but that internal deadlines for booking travel required a decision now.

“We would have loved to perform at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a community that in many ways is consonant with our own San Francisco Bay Area,” he said in a statement. But the orchestra decided to join others determined not to contribute economically to North Carolina until the law is overturned, he said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C3 of the New York edition with the headline: Orchestra Cancels Trip to North Carolina. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe